Question: Did you know how to write computer codes when you were younger, or did you learn at university?

James M Monk answered on 13 Jun 2011:

I got thrown in at the deep end during a summer project towards the end of my undergraduate degree. I learnt by reading someone else’s fortran program and trying to work out what each line does. The resulting code was pretty rough (but no worse than the person I learnt from 😉 but it did work to do some calculations for atomic force microscopy.

These days I use C++ and python – I pretty much picked it up as I went along, and experience counts for a lot. Coding can be something that students sometimes struggle with, since they haven’t always done it before starting out in research. Then again, the people who have coded before can be some of the worst coders if they’ve picked up bad habits.